Narrative Structures in Burmese Folk Tales By Soe Marlar Lwin

narrative states’) but also durative events (i.e., ‘[e]vents with temporal extension blurring the distinction between active and stative propositions’) (Herman, 2002, p. 32).

From this perspective, the concept of events goes beyond understanding them as actions. Instead, actions are suggested as a special type of events among others, and stories are described as an interweavement of various event types. Herman (2002) asserted that understanding events as actions ‘does not provide a sufficiently fine-grained account of states, events, actions, and how they are related to one another’ (p. 38). Because different narrative genres have created different patterns of propositions, events can be fully understood as a resource for microdesigning narratives only by relating them to the story logic.

2.3. Structural Analysis of Folk Tales

There has been extensive literature on narrative because it has been a topic of sustaining interest to linguists and literary critics (Toolan, 1988). It must also be admitted that the study of a storyline over time and across distance is not a new pursuit. One of the most famous works on the structural analysis of folk tales was completed by the Russian scholar Vladimir Propp on Russian fairy tales. It is often claimed that the structural or morphological study of folk tales and mythology begins with Propp.

Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, published in Russian in 1928, was translated into English in 1958 and published in a revised edition in 1968. His study included 115 of the Russian fairy tales collected by Alexander Afanas’ev. Propp (1968) defined morphology as ‘a description of the tale according to its component parts and the relationship of these components to each other and to the whole’ (p.19).